BIM Swiss Army Knife

I present a bit of an analogy to you. ARCHICAD can be your BIM Swiss Army Knife. With ARCHICAD, you can model buildings, site context, landscape, structure, mechanical, you can use it for visualization, construction documents, presentation, renderings, animation, sun studies, and even some basic energy studies. At the Las Vegas BIM Conference 2017, we even saw a construction admin using ARCHICAD as a PDF reader/writer for document coordination! It really does a lot for a single tool.

What can’t you do with a great multi-tool?

But like any good multi-tool, ARCHICAD can’t be expected to perform miracles. You wouldn’t try to whittle a masterpiece, wire an entire house, or endure a wilderness survival show with a Swiss Army knife. You may be able to, but that would just be crazy. It is equally crazy to expect our BIM tool to do everything we would ever need it to on an consistent level. We don’t try to use it as the sole tool for coordinating complex construction projects, we don’t use it for photorealistic renderings and animations, and it certainly will never replace other tools for tabulating energy performance forecasts.

What ARCHICAD does really well, better than most tools in fact, is it models and documents buildings. Everything else it is capable of is awesome, as long as expectations are tempered by the tools limitations. This is no different than the Swiss Army Knife. This tool is one of the best pocket sized (and pocket safe) wine bottle openers on the market. Everything else it can do is helpful, but not necessarily the best on the market. I have used these multi-tools to work on home wiring projects, fish preparation, and even gardening projects, but not on a professional scale. I have also used ARCHICAD for renderings, energy analysis, mechanical coordination and more; but not on every project, and not with the expectation that the output will be as good as that of people who’s entire focus is in those areas of AEC.

The real message here is, ARCHICAD is one tool in a BIM toolbox. It may be the most used and most useful, and it may even be the only one you go to. But it is still only one tool available. When you look at professional quality renderings, those are rarely produced directly from ARCHICAD, and at the very least involve significant post production. When you look at MEP/Structural coordination efforts of massive construction projects, those normally involve other tools such as Solibri. And the very BIM workflow involves IFC, DWG, and PDF coordination to allow for consultants to bring their tools to the project.